Click To View Larger
The Year of the Book by Andrea Cheng; illustrated by Abigail Halpin; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 148 pages; $15.99 (hardcover); reading level: ages 7-11.
Anna Wang is just beginning fourth grade and the word of the week is “perseverance.” “It’s when you don’t give up,” her best friend, Laura, tells the class. Both girls will learn, over the course of the school year, what that word feels like. Laura has to negotiate the breakup of her parents’ marriage and is enticed into a friendship with a girl who doesn’t want Anna around. Anna is trying to come to terms with her Chinese heritage and ashamed (and then ashamed of being ashamed) of her mother’s job cleaning for a man who is wheelchair bound. Anna retreats into the wonderful world of books (their titles and jacket covers are sprinkled throughout the text) and into her creative projects (instructions for her drawstring bag are on the back cover). In the end, both the girls and their friendship grow stronger. The details here, such as a pronunciation guide for Chinese characters, are wonderful; the writing is understated and insightful. This is a tiny, gentle book with a very large heart.
The Year of the book was recently purchased at The Blue Marble Children’s Bookstore by Connie